Whatever it may have been intended that the boy should see on this ecclesiastical pilgrimage, he returned to Rome at the end of three months with his quick, impressionable mind stuffed with food for reflection. Though he had seen the glories of the Church, worshiped in her matchless temples, and sat at the feet of her great scholars, now in the quiet of his little room he found himself dwelling upon a single thought, into which all of his collected impressions were gathered: "The Church--Catholic and Protestant--is--oh, God, the Church is--not sick, not dying, but--_dead_! Aye, it has served both God and Mammon, and paid the awful penalty! And what is left? _Caesarism_!" The great German and British nations were not Catholic. But worse, the Protestant people of the German Empire were sadly indifferent to religion. He had seen, in Berlin, men of family trying to resell the Bibles which their children had used in preparation for confirmation. He had found family worship all but extinct. He had marked the widespread indifference among Protestant parents in regard to the religious instruction of their young. He had been told there that parents had but a slight conception of their duty as moral guides, and that children were growing up with only sensuous pleasures and material gain as their life-aims. Again and again he was shown where in whole districts it was utterly impossible to secure young men for ordination to the Protestant ministry. And he was furnished with statistics setting forth the ominous fact that within a few years, were the present decline unchecked, there would be no students in the Protestant universities of the country. "Do you not see in this, my son," said the Papal Legate, "the blight of unbelief? Do you not mark the withering effects of the modern so-called scientific thought? What think you of a religion wherein the chief interest centers in trials for heresy; whose ultimate effect upon human character is a return to the raw, primitive, immature sense of life that once prevailed among this great people? What think you now of Luther and his diabolical work?" The wondering boy hung his head without reply. Would Germany at length come to the true fold? And was that fold the Holy Catholic Church? And England--ah! there was the Anglican church, Catholic, but not Roman, and therefore but a counterfeit of the Lord's true Church. Would it endure? "No," the Legate had said; "already defection has set in, and the prodigal's return to the loving parent in Rome is but a matter of time."